Re: ESSAY: 'Debunking 'Hippy dippy moral philosophy'

From: fudley (fuddley@fastmail.fm)
Date: Thu Jun 17 2004 - 11:08:53 MDT


On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 "Marc Geddes" Wrote:

> So you'd be quite happy to jump off a
> 200 feet cliff without a parachute?

I’m not an idiot and I’m not a slave to gravity or objective morality
either.

> if morality is objective it is in some sense
> a fundamental property written into the
> structure ofthe universe. So it was present
> during the very proccess of human evolution
> itself, placing certain limits of how
> humans turned out.

If objective morality did not enhance survival (and by corollary
happiness since organisms want to survive) then it is consistent with
what I said before and is of no interest to me; if it did enhance
survival then after 3 billion years of evolutionary pressure it is very
hard to understand why immorality still exists at all.
  
> Read up on complexity theory.

I’ll follow your patronizing advice when you show evidence you know more
complexity theory than I do.

> And objective morality would also imply a
>reasoned explanation as to why you should follow it.

A subjective morality says the ultimate end point to a long chain of
“Why did you do that?” questions is “because it will make me and others
happy and it’s self evident why you don’t need to ask more”. Objective
morality says the ultimate end point is either “because it’s just good
and don’t dare ask any more” or “because God wants it that way and I’ll
kill you if you ask any more”. Very medieval, as I said before.

> By 'objective ' morality I just meant that
> I thought moral KNOWLEDGE existed external
> to the person.

And who exactly is knowing that knowledge external to the person? God?

> Objective knowledge can correlate with subjective experience.

If by objective knowledge you mean information, and I can’t imagine what
else you could mean, then the above is certainly true but a tautology.
At least you could say it more succinctly, “Shit happens”.

John K Clark



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